Like a breeze, I feel his power brush over me again. I brace myself for the nauseating impact, but it doesn’t come. This time, there is no pulse of putrid wrongness. Magic tugs in the air like a wraith’s grasp on an inhale, pulling breath into lungs.
Nothing makes me shudder or gag or keel over. I don’t become sick. Instead, energy thrums around us, and the base of each of my ribbons stretches, my back prickling with goose bumps.
Coughing suddenly erupts in the room, and I jump in alarm, whirling around at the noise. “What—” All around me, the sprawled guards are rolling over or sitting up, hacking on dry coughs like sandpaper against their throats, gasping in breaths through flaking lips.
My wide eyes snap to Ravinger. “How did you—I thought they were dead!”
He lowers his hand again, the lines gone from his palm. “They would’ve been had I waited much longer. A rotting body can only be reversed after so long.”
I blink, shaking my head while the soldiers get to their feet. They’re confused, looking like they just looked Death in the eye and aren’t sure how they were able to cross the line back into living.
“You just...you...why?” I ask breathlessly, because I don’t understand him at all.
Ravinger doesn’t get a chance to answer me though. The bedroom door is suddenly tossed open, interrupting us.
Midas jerks to a stop in the doorway. His golden tunic and pants glimmer in the low light, somehow making his honey blond hair seem even lighter. The look on his face reveals his surprise as his gaze sweeps the room, his tanned, angular jaw tightening. He takes in the staggering guards still attempting to stand at attention, and then his eyes latch onto me. When he notices Ravinger standing next to me, his expression fills with rage.
“What is the meaning of this? What the hell do you think you’re doing in my personal rooms?” I barely recognize Midas’s voice with the fury currently running through it. He stalks forward and stops beside me, though his brown eyes lock onto the rotten king.
Ravinger doesn’t seem bothered by Midas’s anger. In fact, he’s looking at Midas with bored amusement. It seems he hasn’t just transformed his appearance, but in a split second, he’s taken on another persona as well. Even his gestures look different. Ravinger appears cocky and relaxed, black brows arched with an expression that’s somehow both aristocratic and mocking.
The spikes, scales, and glare are all gone. In their place is a derisive turn of his lips and lines vined into his skin, crown cocked on his head. No wonder other people don’t suspect one for the other.
“Oh, are these not my guest chambers?” Ravinger replies with false innocence as he looks around the room. “My mistake.”
“You damn well know it’s not,” Midas grits out. “And what the Divine hell did you do to my guards?”
The men are still coughing a little, but at least they managed to stay standing, even if they do look like death rolled over.
“Oh, them? I rotted them a little.”
Midas blanches. “You...you what?”
I watch the two of them warily, stuck between two unyielding stones.
Ravinger shrugs. “They’re fine now. A little food and rest, and they’ll be right as rain.”
I can feel Midas’s anger as surely as I can see it simmering in his brown eyes. “This is an act of war.”
Green eyes hook onto Midas, spearing him through. “If this was war, you’d know it,” Ravinger says coldly, his disparaging expression replaced by something far crueler. My chest tightens, gaze shooting between them.
Midas seethes silently for a moment, and then his attention shifts to the open door of the cage room—the door that’s now gleaming gold. “What is my favored doing out and vulnerable to a foreign king?” he demands of the guards.
I don’t know how it’s possible, since their pallor is already so terrible, but the armored men seem to pale even more. A couple of them steal nervous, quick looks in my direction, and my stomach sinks.
They saw. They saw the door to the cage room turn gold. In my anger, I slammed my palms against it, trying to break out, and I gilded the whole thing for them to witness.
Midas’s brow gathers thunder, his eyes darkening as he realizes what they must’ve seen.
Shit.
“Foreign king?” Ravinger interrupts, seemingly oblivious. “Midas, we signed a treaty only a few hours ago, don’t you remember? You and I are allies now,” he says with a smirk.
“And yet, here you are, in my chambers, using your powers against my guards and standing beside my favored where you have no right to be!” Midas snaps. “You and I both know you didn’t think these were your rooms.”
Midas doesn’t like to be caught off guard. Being the planner that he is, he’s meticulous in the way things are supposed to play out. With Rav
inger having infiltrated his personal chambers, it’s leaving him threatened, like cornered prey.